Before the yellow jerseys

Even so, those of us who have reported for years about doping in sports cannot fail to wonder how Armstrong went from a very good cyclist to a nearly superhuman one after cancer. For the record, he has never tested positive for a banned substance.

Armstrong's strategy about the doping allegation is consistent with his approach to life and cycling: attack relentlessly, using his financial might to intimidate the accusers with lawsuits.

"It's never fun, and nobody wants to tie up their time with that stuff, but to me it's about justice," he told me in April. "It's not fair to make false accusations, so at least to me, you have to pursue that as much as you can."

A few minutes earlier, in talking about his historic sixth win in the Tour, an achievement that had defied four other great riders in the past 40 years, Armstrong mistakenly used "suspicious" instead of "superstitious" in explaining why people previously had said it was impossible. After catching himself, he added, laughing, "I'm sure there was some suspicion."

One measure of why (if not how) Armstrong began to dominate the Tour de France, from a recent article in the June issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology. The author, Dr. Edward Coyle, had studied Armstrong from 1992 through 1999 and concluded reduced body fat and increased muscular efficiency made him 18 percent more powerful over the seven years, and that, even when untrained, his oxygen-carrying capacity matched the "highest values normal men can achieve with training."